COMPETENCE IN PROFESSIONAL ETHICS – Professional ethics encompass the personal, organizational, and corporate standards of behavior expected by professionals.
The term professionalism originally applied to vows of a religious order. By at least the year 1675, the term had seen secular application and was applied to the three learned professions around this same time. professions: Divinity, Law, and Medicine. The term professionalism was also used for the military.
Professionals and those working in acknowledged professions exercise specialist knowledge and skill. How the use of this knowledge should be governed when providing a service to the public can be considered a moral issue and is termed professional ethics.
Professionals are capable of making judgments, applying their skills, and reaching informed decisions in situations that the general public cannot because they have not attained the necessary knowledge and skills. One of the earliest examples of professional ethics is the Hippocratic oath to which med doctors still adhere to this day.
Some professional organizations may define their ethical approach in terms of a number of discrete components. Typically these include:
- Honesty
- Integrity
- Transparency
- Accountability
- Confidentiality
- Objectivity
- Respect
- Obedience to the law
- Loyalty
Developing ethical competence in the individual (profession) is the only effective way to ensure professional ethics. The development of ethical competence is a long-term process to be achieved through appropriate value education. As a profession is only a subset of life activities, competence in the profession will only be the manifestation of one’s right understanding. The salient features characterizing this competence can be summarized as follows:
- Clarity about the comprehensive human goal: Samadhan – Samridhi – Abhay- – Sah astitva, and its fulfillment through universal human order.
- Confidence in oneself: Based on the right understanding of oneself and the rest of existence.
- Mutually fulfilling behavior: Clarity and confidence in ethical human conduct and its correlation with sustained personal as well as collective happiness and prosperity.
- Mutually enriching interaction with nature: Self-sufficiency in fulfillment of physical needs; ability to assess the needs for physical facilities for the family and their fulfillment through production systems ensuring harmony in nature. In light of the above, acquires the ability to identify and develop appropriate (people-friendly and eco-friendly) technologies, production systems, etc.
Also, read
- Technology Management
- Case studies of typical holistic technologies
- Operations Management in Human values
- Universal Human Order in Human values
- Need for Value education in Human values